BEIJING — Sometimes it’s the simplest questions that are the hardest to answer. For Sheila Taormina, even as she embarks on Olympic history, there is uncertainty and doubt, reservations that gnaw at her, almost incessantly.
Taormina, 39, won a gold medal in 1996 as a member of U.S. swimming’s 4×200-meter freestyle relay team. She then competed in the next two Olympiads as a triathlete. On Friday, the 39-year-old from suburban Detroit will become the first woman to participate in three different Olympic sports when she represents the United States in modern pentathlon, which consists of shooting, fencing, horse show jumping, swimming and running.
But Taormina’s singular achievement is where everything starts to get muddied. In order to reach her athletic threshold, Taormina has had to overcome much more than learning how to shoot a gun or getting a horse to canter. She has begged for sponsorship money, and when she didn’t get it, she found herself months from foreclosing on her home while using her own resources to finance her career.
Before settling on modern pentathlon, she moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for three months, attempting to learn to become a cross country skier, worrying about injuring herself in a remote area trying out a new discipline.
Speaking of worry, there have been bouts of depression and countless hours of therapy and visits to psychologists and psychiatrists from Colorado Springs to Boston. And then there was the stalker.
As she has lived her life, Taormina has tried to fathom exactly what it all means, whether the destination has been worth the exacting journey required to get to Beijing, which she says — right now, at least — will be the final stop.
The answer Taormina comes up with is an absolutely unequivocal . . . “I don’t know.”
“At what point is going after a goal not worth it?” asked Taormina, who has a master of business administration degree. “I was very much on the verge of that, and through all the anxiety and financial stress and the stalking, someone could make a really good case and say, ‘Sheila, it really wasn’t worth it.’
“But I always believed the blessing would come from being here. I believed in this date, being right here in 2008.”
(Her tormenter, a man she never confronted, was convicted of aggravated stalking and imprisoned for almost five years and was released in January. There have been no more incidents.)
A negative thinker
One irony is that for such an accomplished athlete, she has virtually no confidence. “I don’t think I’m the most positive person in the world,” she says.
That might stem from her size. While calling 6-foot-4 swimmer Michael Phelps the perfect marriage of physical and mental strength, Taormina — more than a foot shorter and just 119 pounds — certainly gives away a bit in the former, but pound for pound, she may be as ripped as anyone in the Olympic Village.
Even when she goes to sleep at night, the comparisons don’t stop. Margaux Isaksen — Taormina’s roommate in China and the other member of the U.S. women’s pentathlon team — stands nearly 6 feet tall and is only 16 years old.
“We complement each other very well,” Taormina says, laughing. “She’s tall, blond, beautiful, young and happy. I’m short, dark, cranky, bitter and old.”
Taormina wonders whether her perspective has something to do with her being a big worrier while growing up. One of eight children, Taormina was forced to deal with the death of a sibling when she was 4. Not long after, her parents called her and her twin brother, Steven, a resident of Nederland, into a room and asked how the kids would handle things if they got divorced.
Even the moment that should have been one of the happiest of her life — winning the gold in Atlanta as part of an Olympic record-setting swim — failed to make it past the semis, as it were.
“I had the slowest split on that relay,” Taormina says.
Twelve years later, Taormina likens herself to an old lawn mower sitting in the garage.
“You pull the string and you don’t know whether it’s going to start or not,” she says. “You might need a bunch of pulls. But once you do get that lawn mower going, it cuts the lawn just as well as the new ones.”
“Shallow and selfish”
Her Tuesday news conference, which lasted more than 90 minutes, was one of the few times when Taormina cut herself some slack. While admitting that the quest and the sacrifices she has made to attain it have been, at times, “shallow and selfish,” Taormina argues there’s much that can be gleaned from the pursuit.
“One of the paradigms I was trying to break was the idea that women peaked athletically somewhere between 15 and 18,” she said. Another: “Can you learn a sport in less than 10 years?”
Even with her intense dedication, Taormina’s initial attempts to break into modern pentathlon were met with skepticism. As a three-time Olympian and a gold medalist, she said her expectations were that she would be “trusted” enough to find coaching to help her reach her goal, or would find sponsors to fork over the money necessary to pay for the training.
That proved to be naive.
“I was very surprised. I always thought I’d just work hard enough to do it,” she said. “But when people asked: ‘Have you ridden a horse? Have you fenced? Have you fired a gun? No? Well, good luck with that.’
“I just wanted to see if I could do it.”
Given her background in swimming and running, the thought is that if Taormina can score well in the fencing portion of the competition, she could come away with a medal, an incredible proposition for someone so new to the sport.
Whatever happens, Taormina insists her competitive instincts won’t take over — and this will be her last Olympics.
“I think I’ve pushed so hard this time around that there’s some mental recovery I’ll have to do when I get back home,” she said. “I have to try to really see what relaxation is all about.”
Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com
